21 Levels of Ballet: Easy to Complex | WIRED

I'm Joy Womack a professional ballerina today we are going to go through the different levels of ballet in the interest of time we're going to be focusing on turns the Forte sequence in Swan Lake it is seen as a step that shows your Mastery and your control I would pick Swan Lake as a representative of the culmative challenges of being a principal ballerina as a disclaimer this is my interpretation of complexity level one plie a plie is a building block of our technique it basically means in Fre

nch to bend so it could be a bending of the knee a bending of the ankle but in this case we're going to start in our five positions it's important for the Plies to keep your heels on the ground and be able to feel your pinky toes pushing into the floor the plie is the foundation of Bali because you can't jump you can't turn and you can't move without being able to bend your knees in an outward turned out position level two tandu the tandu starts with their feet in first position or in fifth posi

tion and you brush along the floor moving through the Demi point or bending of the toes to stretch the toes completely and then back to the position from where you started the level 3 alignment and any movement that we're going to do next you're going to always have to think about your hips and your shoulders on the same line we are not only thinking of body alignment we want to be able to dance so that our audience can see all parts of our body and we can use the space in a way that makes sense

so we have what we call invalid or amphas we also have a carte and these are all the different movements and different planes that we work in when I'm doing my passe I like to really think about the back of my thigh pressing to the back of the room and I feel like that keeps me stable and helps me really rotate from the inner parts of my hip lots of things can go wrong in the passe you can fall down towards your knee you have to keep it up high and you can't let your foot cross over your knee a

s well you have to be able to stand on one leg instead of two legs and be able to use your knee and your feet joints to be able to then go on to the more difficult steps that come after it level 5 attitude what it means is basically a bent leg I try to think about lifting the knee up and trying to turn out the foot as much as I can to keep it in that straight line in the world of Classical Ballet and this is definitely arguable we have three main schools of dance with the French School of the at

titude the foot and the knee are almost perpendicular to each other and in the American school it's slightly similar but the leg is lifted higher and then the Russian school being the most extreme and the reason why I have it here is because the things that you can do with turning in an attitude position make it more complex than some of the levels that we've had you need extreme balance control in order to turn in this position of attitude level 6 Arabesque this is the graduation of paste tandu

attitude you have to be able to turn out your legs and then you have to be able to hold that position there are officially four different Airbus so you have first air second Arabesque third Airbus and four therapists either second airbusk or fourth their best can be the hardest because your body is in such extreme twisting positions and your eyes and your arms and your part about all has to be connected to make this movement that it seems so simple but it's so complex let's look at a sequence f

oreign [Music] level 7 Dev Lupe start from your fifth position you pull your foot up through the Posse and then you lift your heel forward and then you're lifting your leg over 90 degrees you have to be so stable on your standing hip and be able to bring your foot forward while not letting your hips fall forward which we're going back to our alignment and you can do this develop a at various levels in speed this is when you use your Artistry to then be able to go into the center and tell a story

level 8 groundbot Mall here is a huge throwing in the lake the 180 degrees or your maximum amount of strength so flexibility is imperative here certainly 100 you need the splits and then you also need a strong stable supporting leg you have to be able to move and use your body and the grand bat helps you train for your jumps so I've placed it after the attitude and after the pasta on purpose because it's a very Dynamic movement level nine on point point is a very special skill where you have to

be able to hold all of your positions to be able to dance to your attitude your autonomous on a platform that's this small so it is something that you really have to love in order to commit to being on point and it actually is destructive to your body to be on point shoes so that is one of the reasons why I put it here level 10 spotting this is the secret to balance and the secret to Dynamic momentum this is a technique where we use our eyes we Face Forward we pick one place and we turn our eye

s as much as we can finding that spot the same exact place that we were just before level 11 shenay turn now we're really getting into the technique of how to do turns it actually means chain so it means one thing after another we start a shiny turn with our legs in tondu and one of our arms out make a half turn where we go into a second position and then we go back into our first position you do that in succession and you add speed and then all of a sudden you have a sequence of one two three f

our five six seven eight level twelve pirouette a pure white is a full rotation that you do from a fixed position either fifth position fourth position or second position you want to take the space with the middle finger and you want to have this second arm push and come and meet the first arm you want to keep everything on the same plane keeping your arms strong and then your standing arms strong and then you want to spot and keep it and then finish very nicely there are so many different ways

to start a pirouette depending on where you are in the world and what school of dance that you're going through so the French the Russian and the American way they all have a different takeoff and landing position let's look at a sequence [Music] foreign foreign [Music] expression expression entails being able to convince and portray to the audience the emotion that you have inside and make that something that is physical and understandable the reason why I put it in this order is it can be actu

ally really difficult to find the right expression for the right movement for example Swan Lake the safe movement with the arms can be either sad or it can be sharp and contrasting and dynamic as well some people argue that you can't teach expression I believe that you can it's something that is passed down through a relationship between a teacher and a student and it's an ability to build trust between your teacher and yourself to find something that's inside of you and then be able to replicat

e that and put that into your body and make it seem organic level 14 glisat now we're moving on to the jumps now we're leaving the floor we have to go from our fifth position use our tondu use our Dynamic strength from the Grandma so the glissard has to be a sharp movement and the feet have to leave the floor at the same time stay up in the air and then close at the same time often the gleece side you are turn out either the leg that's going first or the leg that's coming in so then it looks ver

y turned in or sickled or you plie and you leave one leg and then you leave the floor only for one second and then the second light comes up you really want to be able to have a moment in the air with two legs pointed and then two legs in fifth position the Glee side is so important for being able to have nice connecting steps so you have to be able to do your Palm Bay Padre Gleason so those are all different steps which are going to lead to our next level petite Allegro is super complicated and

you need a lot of coordination from your upper body your part of bra and your lower legs to be able to do this quick movement and give the audience an impression that it's super light and super easy you have to be able to keep your ribs in and your body not going up and down and you have to keep everything in one place while using your arms and making the movements that you're doing very quickly with your feet seem light and fast level 16 on straight cut or beats so now that we've talked about

petite Allegro you can then complicate that petite Allegro by adding a beet so an example of some of those beasts would be an anshikan or an ancientious a few tips that I try to think about when I do my under Shaka or my entrance is trying to change the leg first to really try to get that first beat because the next Beast will come easier if you're late to get the first beat oftentimes you don't arrive with the right foot in the end in the position level 17 Cabrio now we've talked about Beats no

w we've talked about potato leg row now we've talked about quickness a Cabrio is a larger jump which you need your ground up Mom for you take off you brush the leg up to a gromber and your bottom leg has to meet the top leg and then come down back into fifth position it's a great example of a jump that can be a small jump a medium jump or a large jump level 18 is our Tour on layer it's a full rotation it's an actual turn in the air to on there and then you land in fifth position for the men that

's often a double turn in the air for the woman it's normally a single turn even though I've done it in Dan and Acton I've done a double assembly and it takes extreme coordination that you have from your pirouette to be able to get around it's really important to keep your alignment in line you have to have such quick coordination for it I would recommend that dancers really use their spotting technique for the tour on there if you lose your spot it's very hard to make the rotation level 19 pade

sha or soda Shaw what I think of a ground powder shot is a big jump in a split you really want to try to get your knee up as high as you can so that your back leg can get up as high as it can you have several different iterations of a parisha and that means different things to different people they call this jump the step of the cat because you have to have a very nice and light Landing if you've ever seen a cat try to jump onto something they jump and arrive there at the same time level 20 gran

d Allegro this is now all that we've done before put together to explosive music and it is very exciting to watch the grand Allegro requires a ton of stamina and a ton of musicality if you can't hear the music you can be seen as being heavy or behind and you have to have coordination with your music and with your body to be able to give the impression that it's super light and that it's super easy for you to do for me it's a moment in the class that I have time to dance for myself so often my ex

pression shines through whether I'm feeling funny or sad or excited all of those emotions can be showcased in around Allegra level 21 is our Fuentes so you start with a pirate and you're doing a round jump out to the side and then you're pulling in for pirouette to your passe you have to have extreme stamina of your supporting leg extreme coordination and then you have to use spot this is performed at the very culmination the very end of the Parada to showcase the ballerinas Pros develop Arenas

technical Mastery it can go wrong so fast if you don't have a spot you're going to fly off to the side it's a culmination of not being able to give in to feeling tired and then also finishing with showing the audience that that was just very easy for you let's look at a sequence [Music] I know that ballet can seem like it's something otherworldly and unattainable but dance and valleys actually for every single person and I would challenge the audience members who enjoy this video to go out and f

ind an adult beginner class it doesn't matter if you don't do things perfectly we all are on a constant search for Perfection but Perfection doesn't exist so just be the best self you can be and enjoy dancing foreign